READING NOT FOR CHILDREN.
By Editor
READING not for children includes preeminently the ordinary daily newspaper of the present. Filled at the best with sensational news, made up of half-truths, ill-founded reports, poorly-digested facts, exaggerated statements, it does not possess a simple element which is truly educational to the child, or which helps in the formation of character. Not long ago one of these sensational sheets declared emphatically editorially, in a talk with boys, that no boy ought to read the daily papers. Read the following from the Century Magazine, of May, 1888: "How much of an improvement have we in Hoe's wonderful presses, in the steam which drives them, and in the electricity which makes the modern newspaper 'the history (?) of the world for a day'? Its reader has his ten (16 to 24) pages a day and perhaps thirty-two (64 to 100) on Sundays; he has hundreds of thousands of advertisements a year, and is himself numbered among hundreds of thousands of readers; he has daily news of the passing illness of crowned heads, the daily happenings of his own and other countries, everything that may be called 'new,' no matter how inane or evil. He lays his newspaper down bewildered by a phantasmagoria of unconnected facts (?) relating to every part of the universe, with his taste vitiated by slang, bad English, loose information, everything which can dissipate his mental energies, and with his heart, it may be, corrupted by grosser evils. Is he a clearer-headed, a wiser, or a better man than the New Yorker of just a hundred years ago, who, holding up his Independent Gazetteer, and not caring a jot that he had not heard from Boston in two days, or North Carolina in two days, went quietly home to meditate on or discuss an essay of Hamilton, Madison, or Jay? Does the successful modern newspaper make its readers better critics than were made by its predecessors of years ago? The newspapers of the past gave us, in the fulness of time, a literature whose names, from Bryant to Prescott and Motley, are classic. What sort of literature is our modern newspaper likely to give us? The typical modern newspaper, to meet the taste which it has created, must surrender whole columns to writers who aim only at being amusing, and often succeed only in being pert, slangy, or scandalous; and it must find or invent 'news'—news which have about as lofty an influence on the minds of readers as the wonders of the fair had on the mind of Moses Primrose. A continual flood of such matter is not to be offset or corrected by an occasional brilliant editorial or a half-column speech by a public man, or a 'syndicate' story by a good writer. And the efforts are cumulative; such newspapers are steadily training a large number of readers to false standards in the only literature of which they have a close and daily experience; and the newspapers themselves are as steadily being forced to an adoption of these false standards." And how much worse is all this upon a young receptive mind. Take as much pains to secure for your children and for yourself good, pure, true, helpful reading as you would to obtain good food or clean physical environment.